Is Alexa laughing at you?
In the past few days, some users of Echo home speakers
running Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa voice-based digital
assistant have reported hearing strange laughing noises at
random. Some people have said the laughter happened in
response to unrelated commands, while others reported that
it occurred unprompted.
Amazon confirmed on Wednesday that in rare
circumstances, the voice assistant can mistakenly hear
the phrase “Alexa, laugh,” which under its normal
programming would trigger it to chuckle. By late in the
day, the company said it had deployed a software update
to the speaker that fixed the problem.
“We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’
which is less likely to have false positives, and we are
disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh,’” a spokeswoman
said in a statement. The company is also changing the
assistant’s response to the prompt from simply laughter to
“Sure, I can laugh,” followed by laughter, Amazon said.
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